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Are Security Deposits Security Interests - The Proper Scope Of Article 9 And Statutory Interpretation In Consumer Class Actions, R. Wilson Freyermuth

Missouri Law Review

Part I of this article critiques this strand of decisions (referred to collectively throughout the article as the "security deposit cases") and demonstrates that the cases rest upon a flawed understanding of Article 9's scope provisions. In these cases, courts have borrowed landlord-tenant law's traditional distinction between a "debt" and a "pledge"-a distinction used in landlord-tenant law to justify a baseline rule under which title to a security deposit passes entirely to the landlord, with the landlord having no positive duty to invest the deposit or pay interest to the tenant. As Part I explains, the security deposit cases wrongly …